WordPress removes interview with British ‘straight pride’ group
Campaign group for ‘heterosexual equal rights’ uses US copyright law to issue a takedown notice. WordPress has removed an interview with the “homophobic” campaign Straight Pride UK after the group used...
View ArticleWith purchase of Oculus Rift, Facebook pushes towards a virtual reality future
It is a decades-old promise that looked most likely to be realised in fiction rather than fact. Now, though, virtual reality might finally reach the mainstream after Facebook spent $2bn (£1.2bn) to buy...
View ArticleFacebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw
For one week in January 2012, Facebook deliberately made about 155,000 people sad, just to see if it could. Stated that bluntly, it’s not hard to see why the company’s study, which was published in the...
View ArticleGamergate’s anti-woman agenda made clear: Actor Felicia Day threatened for...
Gamer and actor Felicia Day has had her personal details posted online just minutes after making her first public statement about Gamergate – in which she expressed fear about saying anything at all,...
View Article‘Operation Onymous’ may have exposed flaws in top Internet privacy tool
The Tor project, which oversees the development of the anonymous browser, has expressed concern over an intergovernmental operation that took down 27 hosts offering “hidden services”, or websites only...
View ArticleWebcam ‘creepshot’ pictures viewed and shared on Reddit
Commenters on the discussion site Reddit pored over compromised security camera feeds linked from the Russian website Insecam, screenshotting and sharing pictures of naked or half-dressed women. The...
View ArticleFCC chief: No matter what we do, the ‘big dogs’ will sue over net neutrality
No matter what rules the federal communications commission implements on net neutrality, it can expect to face down lawsuits from the major internet service providers, according to its chairman Tom...
View ArticleReddit bans users for sharing hacked Sony documents
In the wake of the massive hack that has seen more than 250GB of private files shared online, Sony Pictures is successfully cracking down on discussion of its stolen data on sites such as Reddit. The...
View ArticleFacebook apologizes for ‘cruel’ Year in Review after grieving father reminded...
Facebook has apologised after learning, yet again, that not everything can be done algorithmically. Some things, it seems, need the human touch. The company’s latest blunder stems from a seemingly...
View ArticleGamergate hits new low with attempts to send SWAT teams to critics
Internet trolls are attempting to get police Swat teams sent to the homes of critics of Gamergate in an escalation of intimidatory tactics. Five police officers were sent to the home of a Seattle-area...
View ArticleGamergate target Zoe Quinn launches ‘Crash Override’ anti-harassment network
A group of people targeted with online harassment have launched a support network aimed at helping others who find themselves in the same situation. The network, Crash Override , will go further than...
View ArticleCharlie Hebdo launches app version featuring prophet Muhammed cover
Latest issue of French satirical magazine available in Apple and Google Play stores A new app for French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has been released for iOS, Android and Windows devices, letting...
View ArticleWikipedia bans five editors from gender-related articles amid #Gamergate...
Wikipedia’s arbitration committee, the highest user-run body on on the site, has banned five editors from making corrections to articles about feminism, in an attempt to stop a long-running edit war...
View Article‘We will hunt you': Anonymous claims victory over jihadi Twitter accounts in...
Hacker collective Anonymous claims to have taken control of almost 100 Twitter accounts associated with Isis in an operation begun in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The accounts seized in...
View ArticlePhishing scam targets routers that use default security settings
Californian information security firm Proofpoint uncovers attack on Brazilian internet users with generic router login details such as ‘admin’ Internet users are being warned to ensure that their...
View Article‘Walking Dead’ creator Robert Kirkman aims to ‘fix television’
Robert Kirkman, the creator of The Walking Dead, makes no secret of his ambition to “fix comics”. Now, as Kirkman’s realm grows to cover TV and films, so too does that ambition. From its roots as a...
View Article‘Copyleft’ activists victorious as Elon Musk’s SpaceX frees more than a...
Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company SpaceX has conceded to pressure to free its images, and released a batch of more than 100 photos under the “copyleft” Creative Commons license. As the first...
View ArticleScientists create algorithm that ‘identifies future trolls from just five posts’
It is possible to tell comment trolls apart from other users simply from looking at the way they write, researchers have found. Studying the comments on three sites – CNN, Breitbart and IGN – over an...
View ArticleGoogle Maps hides an image of the Android robot pissing on Apple
Someone at Google is probably getting fired. A small patch of terrain in Google Maps just south of the Pakistani city of Rawlpindi has been found to contain a bizarre image of the Android robot...
View ArticleTwitter blocks promoted tweets by notorious white supremacist
Twitter has banned promoted tweets that were being used to push white supremacist messages on the website. The tweets were sent and promoted through the company’s advertising tools by Andrew ‘weev’...
View ArticleElon Musk announces Hyperloop pod-race competition
Can you build a half-size, hypersonic passenger pod? If so, Elon Musk wants to hear from you Elon Musk, the man behind the futuristic spaceflight company SpaceX, the futuristic electric car company...
View ArticleReddit revolts: Subforums shut down in protest over AMA co-ordinator sacking
Many of the biggest subreddits on social news site Reddit have shut down to protest against the sacking of a well-liked community co-ordinator. The so-called “Reddit Revolt” has seen the temporary...
View ArticleCheating site Ashley Madison hacked as attackers demand total shutdown
Site’s hackers claim 37m personal records have been stolen from notorious dating site, with Cougar Life and Established Men also compromised Hackers have stolen and leaked personal information from...
View ArticleSXSW considering ‘all-day event on harassment’ after pulling gaming panels
Festival has offered to reinstate one of the panels it cancelled after threats of violence and is reportedly considering an all-day event on the topic Austin’s South-by-Southwest (SXSW) festival is...
View ArticleFlorida woman arrested for hit-and-run after her car calls police
A Florida woman has been arrested for a hit-and-run accident in Port St Lucie, after her car called the police to report the collision. According to police, who say the 57-year-old driver hit a truck...
View ArticleHow Reddit took on its own repulsive users — and won
Since 2006, the site insisted anything that wasn’t illegal should be tolerated. Under Ellen Pao’s brief leadership, all that changed...
View ArticleMuslim professor blocked from online game because his name was on...
Epic Games has apologised after mistakenly barring an American professor from playing its online game Paragon because someone who has the same name as him was on a US government blacklist. Muhammad...
View ArticleIraq war architect Donald Rumsfeld releases video game
Donald Rumsfeld, the two-time US secretary of defence who presided over the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, has released a video game. The game, initially released as an iOS app , is based on a...
View ArticleFacebook says it suspended Bernie Sanders groups because of a ‘glitch’
A bug in Facebook’s anti-spam algorithm has been accidentally suspending groups on the social network, sparking anger from the groups’ founders and conspiracy theories from some of their followers. On...
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